Sacrifice
by W.Blackbird
Summary: When Star Wars prequel-era characters are placed in an Alice Academy setting, follow Anakin as he wrestles with the essence of love and mortality.


**Sacrifice**

A story told in four parts. _Shi_ , is the number of death.

 **Part I**

Anakin always knew he would die young. More than that, he always knew it would be for a woman. Anakin always figured it would be his mom.

Anakin loved his mom with all of the unerring adoration of a little boy. She was beautiful and perfect and kind and loved him even though he made her life so hard. Mom had been disowned, because of him, because Anakin had no father. Mom had been raped, and her family had figured she'd been "asking for it." It was a disgrace to have a child born out of wedlock. Anakin thought the whole thing was really stupid. Who'd ask to get hurt? Isn't that just what bad guys do: Hurt people? It didn't matter though, didn't change the fact that Anakin never knew his grandparents...or his dad. It didn't change the fact that Mom loved him anyway. It didn't change the fact he was afraid he looked like his not-dad, might be like him, and Mom _still_ loved him anyway.

The dying young part though, it definitely didn't surprise him. Mom was an Alice, first form, but he was an Alice, _fourth form_. Anyone who knows anything about Alices knows what that means. Mom tells him not to use his Alice so much; if he doesn't, he won't get hurt. He won't get sick. The problem is Mom gets sick all the time. Mom has the divination Alice, it's first form so it doesn't hurt her, _technically_ , but she uses it to escape the Academy. She swears she'll never let them take her son, and she won't let them take her from him, like she had been taken from her parents. The constant moving though, it takes its toll. Anakin's mother struggles on her meager earnings to feed them both, and she is often ill. Anakin uses his invention Alice to help her. It only hurts a little, really, and he could heal when he gets older, and she wouldn't need the help so much. His crowning achievement is C-3P0 who worries and fusses over his mom, as much as she worries and fusses over him. He'd passed out for a day after putting the finishing touches on the droid, but it was worth it. It doesn't stop the fear.

Maybe it's the shadow death casts over his life, but Anakin carries inside him a fierce rage. It smolders under his skin, and takes very little to fan it to flame. Anakin skips school, and gets into trouble. He builds mini-motorcycles to speed. He beats up the boy who dares say a word against his mom. He does it all, because it's _not fair_. It's _so_ not fair, and if he could walk up to Death itself, he'd give him-her-it-them a what-for! Death is some immutable entity unchanging and eternal which no one can touch. He hates it. He doesn't understand it. What right is there in living, and loving, and dreaming when it will all get stripped away from you? He realises quickly though, he's hurting his mom getting into trouble like he does, so he locks the fear away behind a prison of determination. When his mom gets too sick to work, Anakin decides it's time to be a big boy. No more being selfish. He writes to the Academy and they come for him. The money they send his mother will be a huge help, and he won't burden her anymore. He'll only die young anyway. Maybe this way, it'll hurt less.

He is ten years old.

 **Part II**

Things are different at the Academy. He is more understood there. He's not the only one with a shitty Alice to contend with. He actually makes some friends, not many, he doesn't want them to be sad when he dies, (and others are just too jealous), but still he has them: Friends. Identified as being one of those rare individuals with three Alices, telekinesis, divination, and invention, Anakin is made a three star, and is put in the latent abilities class two of his three Alices belong to. You'd have thought being at the Academy would have been enough to take the reckless edge off. His presence there alone supports his mother, and his Alices are common enough he could coast by, and not do any further harm, but this isn't what goes down. Anakin never stops using his Alice. Never stops pushing himself past his limits.

It happens rather simply one day, Anakin is scanning for impressions of his future, a basic exercise, and realises nothing has changed. He will die for an exceptional woman. Anakin makes the decision then and there, he is going to cease to use his Alices and heal. Maybe the resolve to be better, smarter, will change things; when he gets out of here he can get a great job and support his Mom! Problem is, even then, nothing changes. It doesn't matter how hard he tries. He's still dying young. It's immutable. Anakin makes the choice, if he's going to die, it's going to be on his own terms. He'll die with what he loves. He writes to his mother often; he doesn't know if she even gets the letters. The Academy isn't fond of runners.

Anakin switches into the Technical ability class, and loses himself in his inventions. Telekinetically manipulating parts and divining what he needs is a huge asset too. He makes things for his friends. He makes things for the environment. He creates impossible works of art to rival Leonardo da Vinci. If he's going to be killed by his Alice; it'll leave a lasting, useful legacy. Ahsoka toddles up and holds her hand out under a machine that dispenses a cookie for a smile. She's a kid who hangs around that he can't get rid of. He tackles her down and tickles her until she swears she's gonna pee.

He loves what he does, and if he has one guilty pleasure it would be flying. He does it purely for himself. Anakin builds small planes, speeder bikes, flying motorcycles, anything that could rush him through the air. Up there defying gravity, Anakin feels free. There he can breathe. He brings the children from Class A up with him all the time. Rex and Ahsoka are the most persistent little buggers always asking to play. Anakin has an obvious soft spot for these little kids even if he'll never admit to it. Perhaps it's because Anakin has never been able to shake the feeling that he should be looking out for others, not the other way around. He feels happy when he makes them laugh, like bleeding out his Alice for them is all worth it. It is.

Nothing ever will last, at his sixth Alice Festival, Anakin has a vision of calamity. There is a violent attack on the Academy, and Anakin rushes forward to protect the elementary principal, Palpatine. He's the one in most danger. Anakin sees the projectiles come before most with only physical eyes could. Stretching out his right hand he uses telekinesis to tear them apart at the atomic level as they get closer. Everyone watches in trepidation. Anakin hardly notices. All he sees is the explosion that started everything, ended everything. Ahsoka lies dead in front of him, her body distorted into odd angles. Anakin screams, and chokes on blood. How did he not see that too?

He wakes up in the hospital with a letter next to him. It is from his mother; the first he's received in years. He opens it looking for comfort. She's gotten married; she has a husband, and a step-son. He crumbles the letter into his fist and weeps.

He is fifteen years old.

 **Part III**

Anakin is sixteen when he winds up in the hospital for severe Alice overuse. He's passed out before, had bad moments, but things are truly deteriorating. He is coughing up blood. He struggles to breath. Anakin is now pouring everything into his inventions. He hardly even sleeps, but his work doesn't bring him pleasure. It brings him satisfaction.

Principal Palpatine had found him in the aftermath of the attack by Z, and thanked him for saving his life. He'd understood Anakin's rage, the cruelty of loss. Palpatine had lost all his family to terrorists at a young age. He knew it infuriated Anakin more than anything that those assholes still breathed air when his girl didn't. Death comes in many cruel ways. It hangs over everyone, some more than most, just waiting to strike. Death could come for you through sickness, disease, old age, your own damn Alice, but for anyone, _anyone_ , to remove someone's life for their own self-centered ends? That was intolerable. Anakin needs justice. This could never happen again. Anakin was drafted into the Dangerous Ability class.

It was a move that seemed to surprise nobody. Anakin had terrified the general populace with his telekinetic ability. What else could he do? Rip people apart with it limb by limb? It's just _hilarious_ too: How he is the _only_ telekinetic feared in the school. After all, only someone with the fourth form Alice would have the strength to do that—and kill themselves doing it. (They always forgot that part). All his "friends" left him. He was ostracised by everyone in school. Children were shuffled away from him. He didn't care; he swore up and down. He poured his soul into his inventions: Weapons. These went to support the fight against Z.

Anakin starts coughing again when a soft hand covers his neck and glows with warmth soothes and heals his aching throat. He looks up to say 'Thank you,' but the words cease before they cross his lips. He is looking into soft brown eyes. He knows these eyes. He knows he will love these eyes. It's why he's avoided her so long. This girl, in her last year of the Academy, is called Padmé Naberrie.

"Is that better?" She asks him with a gentle smile. He nods up and down with ridiculous vigour. He'd never thought they'd meet like this. She is the president of the student council. He's seen her from a distance since the first year he came here. He'd looked at her and seen love: Love at first sight, or what would be realised as love. For someone like Anakin who has divination, he knows love is neither born nor created; it exists between everyone only to be recognised. It's potential energy, neither created nor destroyed. It's in the way parents love their newborn whether the child turns out well or not. Love is something that wells up between people, family: A bond that can be nurtured, but exists beyond creation, never formed, only realised. Padmé is family, and he loves her. He will love her. This scares him, and he has avoided her for it. What use would there be in it? Besides, she's five years older than he anyway.

"I'm Anakin," he says stupidly, but she doesn't seem to mind.

"I know, I read your chart. I'm Padmé, by the way."

He smiles, but fears it looks like a grimace.

"Your lungs are in pretty bad shape. Do you mind if I heal them too?"

He nods again, and she places her hand on his chest, sustaining him.

* * *

Anakin's philosophy teacher takes an unfortunate interest in him from the moment he enters High School. He is concerned by Anakin's lack of concern over his own life. After the hospitalisation, the hovering gets ten times worse.

"Fuck off," he tells Dr. Kenobi, but the man is persistent. It drives Anakin to distraction, because philosophy is a bunch of bullshit by a bunch of pricks who have nothing to do each day, but talk about garbage and act smart. He doesn't need some fucking teacher trying to analyse his head. Kenobi doesn't stop though. He still keeps tabs on Anakin. In spite of himself, Anakin feels warmed. Anyone else would have given up by now….except maybe Padmé.

* * *

It is in her arms he sobs when he ends up in the hospital the third time. Anakin has just been on his first mission. He hadn't realised...how stupid could he have been? He'd trusted Palpatine! He hadn't known the soldiers were child soldiers. He still resents Z, but Palpatine is just as bad, clearly, maybe worse. He'd only wanted to make it right. What has he done? He is too pumped with drugs to feel embarrassed he is crying in his crush's arms. She runs her fingers through his hair, and whispers sweetly to him. She cries a bit herself. She says she wishes she could heal his heart, as easily as she does his body.

"You've made me feel lighter than I have in years." He tells her. She kisses his forehead.

* * *

He takes more missions than ever trying to protect the younger ones.

* * *

Anakin starts hanging around the hospital more, despite the fact that he associates the dread place with death. Padmé makes it bright. She lays her hands on children and heals them, inspires them, listens to them. He needs to see that: Her beauty. She comes out sometimes and cries that she can't do more. He holds her. He doesn't know how to explain the light she is in this darkness. All he's seen is pain, and there is one woman who walks out in the indifferent storm and offers peace. She is a goddess.

"Why did you stay after graduation?" He asks instead. He thinks he knows the answer.

"Because someone needs to fight for the children." She takes her head off his chest to look into his eyes. "But I think you already know that."

When she gives him a healing stone saying she hopes it'll protect him in the field, he tries not to read anything into it.

* * *

"You know, Anakin," Kenobi starts off and Anakin has to suppress a smile. He's gotten used to this man and his need to debate everything . "Have you ever considered that it might be as much of a curse to die old as young?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the High School Principal, Yoda, has the longevity Alice. He will live centuries. Nothing life-threatening can harm him. His body will regenerate. He will watch everyone he has ever loved grow old and die. He's loved women, but he won't pursue them, because they will age, and he will not. Have you ever thought about that?"

"No, but it sounds awful. Perhaps everyone should get to live forever?"

"Perhaps, but everything, absolutely everything will pass away. In that capacity, it is fair."

Anakin snorts at that.

"Be that as it may, Anakin, I'll say it again: You'll be less exhausted if you stop fighting the inevitable and make your peace with it."

"I'll just give up then." He mutters sarcastically, but Obi-Wan pauses shuffling his papers and stares him sadly in the eye.

"No, Anakin, I said make your peace with it."

* * *

Anakin does give up fighting the inevitable. He brings his Alice stone to Padmé and places it gently in her palm.

"You don't have to consider this an exchange," he musters the nerve to say, "but my feelings are genuine giving this to you."

"Silly boy," she whispers, and leans up on tiptoes to kiss him.

Anakin is eighteen years old.

 **Part IV**

Anakin learns Padmé and Obi-Wan are part of an underground organisation working to take Palpatine down, but they are not a part of Z. Z, Anakin discovers, is lead by a man called Dooku. Dooku may want to take the Academy down, but only to take over where Palpatine would have left off. Even so, things are going well for the Rebellion. They have an inside agent Quinlan Vos, owner of the stealing Alice, who is removing the strength from Palpatine's clones. Soon, it will be time to move. Padmé collects information about the Elementary principal's misdeeds, and publishes them under a pseudonym. Obi-Wan helps her by using his second Alice, which it turns out, is Voice Pheromones. (The first is memorisation.) It occurs to Anakin this shouldn't surprise him at all. Obi-Wan has always been a smooth-operator. His esteem for him rises as he understands Obi-Wan never used this talent on him to convince him of anything. They become closer, and Anakin starts making surveillance tech to help discern the principal's moves. Strategy meetings become easier and easier.

Anakin's health isn't getting much better with his DA activities, but he's trying harder to be healthy. Padmé keeps him supplied with healing stones. He tells her once he feels bad he's only ever been able to give her one stone, but she shushes him and says it cost him far more to give it to her. It means the world to Padmé. He doesn't point out how much it costs her emotionally to give stones to a terminally ill man. He doesn't want her to leave him; it's not like she doesn't know anyway. Inexplicably, she loves him, so he tries very hard to make sure she will never regret it. The actual effort he puts into living somehow compensates for the extra pressures he puts on himself. He tries again in his specialised courses. His grades start to matter. When he graduates, he resolves he will be an engineer. He and Padmé can marry. They'll be happy. They'll win the war, and leave this battlefield behind them. He can hardly wait.

It is a few months before his graduation when the message from Vos comes: Z is planning to attack the Academy. Dooku knows Yaddle, the middle school principal who protects the school with her barrier Alice, is weakening. He means to break the barrier and infiltrate. Vos plans to assassinate Dooku in the chaos. The Rebellion should use this window of opportunity to get the Principal. They don't really have an alternative. Padmé is Yaddle's personal healer, and she does all she can to keep the elderly woman healthy, but not even Yoda's longevity stones can help anymore. Yaddle's time has come, and has been a long time coming.

When Z attacks, Obi-Wan and Anakin storm Palpatine's residence. Padmé follows behind at a much slower pace. She has the guns Anakin made for her strapped to her hips, but Padmé is a healer. She stops every few meters to take care of some poor soul, typically a child, caught under Z's bombs. She exhausts herself saving them, and Anakin burns with pride. When they get into the inner sanctum, Obi-Wan splits off to find the intercom. He'll use his voice to stop the Z attack, and anyone who would defend Palpatine. It works masterfully. Anakin meets no resistance as he enters Palpatine's bunker.

Gun drawn, he hesitates as he looks at the man who has used him, and exploited so many children. It seems so simple to just put a bullet through his head. Was that it? Was that all it would take? One press of a trigger and it'd be gone? It seemed too easy. It seemed there should be more for a man who had wrought so much pain.

"Oh, Anakin," Palpatine smiles cruelly at him. "Did you really think it would be so easy, my friend?"

The doors burst open behind them and Anakin is unable to stop the automatic need to look over his shoulder. Two of Palpatine's guards have come in with Padmé trapped in their arms. They are wearing ear plugs to block out Obi-Wan's powerful voice.

"Now, Anakin," the bastard starts his threats, but Padmé knocks her head back breaking the nose of one of her captors. Anakin uses the distraction to shoot both of the guards and telekinetically undo Padmé's bonds. It's time to end this. He turns to put the next bullet through Palpatine's throat when the man in question draws a hidden weapon. Anakin feels time slow as he senses what's to come seconds before it happens. Palpatine will turn, raise his weapon, and shoot Padmé through her mouth opened to call Anakin's name in warning. This will not happen. Anakin turns and places himself directly between them taking the bullet straight to the chest. Padmé cries out, shoots Palpatine through the forehead, and rushes to cradle her fiancé in her arms.

"Ani, oh, my Ani," she stammers out. "I've used up all my Alice...I can't, I'm trying, I'm trying." She presses her hands repeatedly over the hole on his chest, but there's nothing she can do. Nothing can stop this. Anakin almost smiles. He'd known this would happen from the day he was born it seems. He regrets many things, but never this. It's fortunate; it was the one inevitable thing in his life. Maybe that's why he cannot regret it. This act came from the core of his character. Hell, it hadn't even really been about his Alice in the end. He could have been healthy as a ram and this would have happened.

"Shh," he manages to speak. "Don't cry, my love."

Anakin makes his peace with death only as he finds it. He understands with an odd sort of clarity what his short life had meant: Love. Only the deepest, truest love, would stay knowing the grief to come. Only love would possess him to drain his Alice as he had done, take a bullet as he had done, sacrifice as he had done. Even Yoda with his long life needed to dredge up the courage to love those who would die. The man shut himself away, but to love in a world where there is death is true and brave. Anakin knows he'd loved and been loved. His life short-lived gave the proof, showed the depth. This is immortal. This is untouchable. Love is the ache in your chest when someone is gone, because it stretches out the void looking for the object of affection. His body was a vessel of passion, and that can never be destroyed.

"I love you," he whispers. Padmé cradles his head and whispers the words back to him. Her tears stain his face. Oh, if only they could've had more time. Inside Padme's womb, two young hearts beat.

Anakin was twenty-one years old.


End file.
